The first few years, every time someone asked me something on a call, I felt like I had to have the answer right there. Not "let me look into it". The answer.
Then one day I heard someone on the team say "mmm, I need to check" and just keep going. Nobody wrote it down, nobody gave them a look, the meeting moved on. I had spent months carrying a rule nobody had ever written.
I've worked remotely since 2019, almost always for US teams, always from El Salvador. Nobody handed me impostor syndrome. I put it on myself.
Nobody ever talked down to me#
In 2019 I walked into every call feeling like I didn't measure up. Not because of anything anyone had said. Because of my English, because of where I'm from, because I didn't study where they studied.
And here's the important part: they never treated me that way. Not once. Nobody made me feel small, nobody talked to me differently, nobody left me out of anything. It was me, wired that way for reasons I still don't fully understand. And I'm not the only one: Daniel Reis tells almost the same story from Brazil, with a European team and the same fear of the microphone.
That's worse than it sounds, because if someone treats you badly you have something to push back against. When it comes from you, there's nobody to take it up with. It only shows up in the details.
Story points, for example. I'd say a number that seemed right to me, without overthinking it, and then I'd keep turning over whether they'd feel it was "a lot". Not whether the number was right. Whether they'd think I was taking too long. Nobody asked me to.
Or Slack. I write more formally in English than in Spanish, and I read every message three times before sending it. I still do it: I have a Claude project I use only for that, to review what I'm about to write before I write it. It isn't insecurity, it's editing. The problem is when editing takes longer than the conversation. Nobody asked me to.
The accent I couldn't understand wasn't mine#
What did give me real trouble was English, but not the way I thought.
I worried about my accent all the time. The day I truly didn't understand anything was on a call with people from another part of the world who weren't native English speakers either. This was before I had auto captions or meeting notes on every call. I sat there for an hour without catching a full sentence.
That's when it hit me that English wasn't my personal problem. It's everyone's problem on a call where nobody speaks it natively.
I still mispronounce things and I still use the wrong tense. And nothing has happened, because the point lands anyway.
I waited for the expensive thing to fail#
The first time I said "this is wrong" without softening it was about a change that didn't deliver value. I built my case, I said it, and they agreed. That simple. All that stored-up fear for that.
The one that still stings is a different one. There was a performance problem and the team pointed at infrastructure: the fix was going to be scaling up.
I thought the problem was earlier than that, in the code, and that scaling would only move the ceiling up a little. I didn't say it. I waited for them to try, for it not to work, and only then did I open my mouth.
I was right. And it was worth nothing, because by the time I said it the team had already spent the attempt.
That's the bill nobody hands you: the difference between saying it on day one and saying it after the expensive thing fails is the team's time and money. Being right late counts the same as not being right.
In remote work, what nobody sees doesn't exist#
If I had to tell one single thing to someone from here starting tomorrow with a team over there, this would be it.
If you're stuck and you don't say so, as far as the team knows you're moving along. If you finished something and you don't mention it, as far as the team knows you didn't do it. If you have an idea and you keep it to yourself, nobody is ever going to know.
A test that helps me tell whether I'm shrinking: if my manager had to write my review using only what they can see in Slack and in pull requests, what would it say? The code and the scaling wouldn't have shown up there. I had the right answer in a place where nobody could see it.
And this is where the two things meet. When you feel like you don't measure up, the natural reaction is to shrink: talk little, don't ask, don't bother anyone. That's exactly the opposite of what remote work needs.
What got me out of it wasn't convincing myself I was just as capable. It was forcing myself to talk until I forgot it was hard.
And the first thing I changed was the unit of measure. In 2019 I worked to look available: reply fast, stay online, make sure people could tell I was there. Then I started working toward goals: what I'm shipping this week, what's blocked, what I need from whom. When that is clear and visible, nobody needs to see you online. Today it's the first thing I'd tell someone starting out.
Seven years later#
Impostor syndrome didn't leave. But it's a lot smaller now.
What still costs me is giving my opinion on the spot. If the topic comes out of nowhere on a call, it's hard to let go of the argument without running it through my head in English first, or without a short draft. I've gotten better, but it's still there.
And it's exactly the same fear from those first years, the one about having to show up with the answer ready. Seven years later, down to the size that fits in one sentence.
The rest#
Three shorter things I learned late:
The day doesn't end on its own. In an office you grab your things and the ride home works as a border. Remote, there's no door and there's always one more message.
You have to go looking for people. You can go days without seeing anyone outside your house and not notice until the week is over. I see my friends, I go out with my family, I take the dogs out, I go out with my wife. Written like that it sounds obvious, but at the start I wasn't doing it.
The chair. I worked for years on whatever I had around, neck bent over a laptop. Investing in ergonomics was one of the best things I did and I did it late.
I still work from the same city, for teams that are thousands of miles away. If you're starting out and you feel like you don't measure up on calls: it happened to me too, and it doesn't get fixed by convincing yourself of anything. It gets fixed by talking.
If you're in that spot and want to tell me how it's going, email me. And if you want the next post, there's the RSS feed.